All-Star Cheer Squad Review (Wii)

I wasn’t immediately sure why I was assigned to review All Star Cheer Squad, THQ’s latest rhythm game all about cheerleading. I’m not its target audience since I’m not female and I don’t look good cheering on sports teams, so I assume my boss did this to be evil. But that was okay; I resolved to go in with a positive attitude because I’d rather have fun, even if a game’s premise doesn’t appeal to me.

The basic idea is to follow a cheer routine, using your Wiimote and Nunchuk. The game will tell you the moves you need to do, and you set your hands to mimic that pose. Your character will do the move if you followed the gesture correctly, or get out of sync with the cheer squad in the background if you mess up. You can think of it as DDR with your hands rather than your feet, and with a lot of high school motifs to it.

The developers clearly put in a lot of effort to give you things to do. Going through routines can unlock new stages and new moves, plus a reasonable number of options to customize your character’s appearance. It also has practice modes, co-op and versus multiplayer, a create-a-routine mode, and a story mode. So this is all fine, all the bases have been covered.